Lowery Stokes Sims

In this collection of ground-breaking essays, five prominent curators and scholars - Ann Gibson, Keith Morrison, Sharon F. Patton, Richard J. Powell, and Lowery Strokes Simsexplore postmodernism's influence on African American art during the last thirty years. Covering the works of such contemporary artists as Renee Stout, Joe Overstreet, David Hammons, Beverly Buchanan, and Martha Jackson-Jarvis, the book revisits the questions, posed in the 1930s by critics Alain Locke and James Herring, about how to define and to interpret African American art. The contributors address such interrelated issues as an African American aesthetic identity, personal experiences of culture, the relationship between art and politics, and the blurring of the distinction between "art" and "craft." They describe the new aesthetic of pan-African art, analyze individual works of art, and argue that the multicultural embrace of the 1990s misappropriates African American culture. Illustrated with photographs of the works discussed, the book is the first to explore the provocative issues raised at the confluence of two of contemporary art's most richly layered movements. It also provides an insightful survey of the relationships between individual works of art, postmodern theory, and a nascent African American aesthetic.

Noah Purifoy made art in order to enact social change. Created mostly from found objects, his neo-Dadaist sculpture both embodies and reflects the environment in which it was created - whether the burnt ruins of the 1966 Watts Riots or the unforgiving climate of the Mojave Desert. This book follows Purifoy's remarkable life and career, during which he transitioned from high-end furniture designer to assemblage artist, social worker, arts administrator and finally creator of a desert art museum. Illustrated throughout with works from every stage of Purifoy's career, this volume also includes essays by acclaimed curators, critics, journalists and fellow artists - all champions of this profoundly thoughtful sculptor whose work has been under recognized for far too long. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.0Exhibition: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA (7.6.-27.9.2015).

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today' introduces the work of more than twenty exceptional artists in conversation with one another for the first time. With works in a range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, the exhibition showcases a diverse range of unique visual vocabularies within non-representational expression. By highlighting these artists? individual approaches to form, color, composition, material exploration and conceptual impetus within hard-edge and gestural abstraction, Magnetic Fields provides an expanded history of non-pictorial image and object-making. The exhibition not only celebrates these artists as leaders in the field, but also the enduring ability of abstraction to convey both personal iconography and universal themes.00Exhibition: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Kansas City , Missouri (08.06. - 17.09.2017).

"With its signature style that marries Cubism and Surrealism with Afro-Cuban and Caribbean motifs, the art of Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) occupies a unique position in the history of modern art. Like many modern artists, specifically Pablo Picasso, Lam participated in the primitivist movement, drawing inspiration and imagery from non-western, pre-technological cultures. Yet, unlike European and Euroamerican primitivists, Lam, who was a Cuban of Spanish, African, and Chinese descent, was engaging with his own cultural heritage in his works. His authenticity as both "primitive" and "primitivist" challenges the fundamental tenets of primitivism and makes Lam an ambiguous, fascinating figure in twentieth-century art.". "This study explores Lam's enduring contribution to world art history - the reclamation and projection of an African identity within mainstream art. Lowery Stokes Sims surveys Lam's work, focusing on the period from 1947 onwards, in which he demonstrated the viability of nationalist pursuits within modernism to a new generation of artists in Europe and Latin America. She traces his career and life and the critical reception of his work in Cuba and Latin America, the United States, and Europe in succession as each locale predominated chronologically in his career."--BOOK JACKET.

From one of the world's greatest economic minds, author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty, a clear and vivid map of the road to sustainable and equitable global prosperity and an augury of the global economic collapse that lies ahead if we don't follow itThe global economic system now faces a sustainability crisis, Jeffrey Sachs argues, that will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. The changes will be deeper than a rebalancing of economics and politics among different parts of the world; the very idea of competing nation-states scrambling for power, resources, and markets will, in some crucial respects, become passZ. The only question is how bad it will have to get before we face the unavoidable. We will have to learn on a global scale some of the hard lessons that successful societies have gradually and grudgingly learned within national borders: that there must be common ground between rich and poor, among competing ethnic groups, and between society and nature.The central theme of Jeffrey Sachs's new book is that we need a new economic paradigm-global, inclusive, cooperative, environmentally aware, science based-because we are running up against the realities of a crowded planet. The alternative is a worldwide economic collapse of unprecedented severity. Prosperity will have to be sustained through more cooperative processes, relying as much on public policy as on market forces to spread technology, address the needs of the poor, and to husband threatened resources of water, air, energy, land, and biodiversity. The "soft issues" of the environment, public health, and population will become the hard issues of geopolitics. New forms of global politics will in important ways replace capital-city-dominated national diplomacy and intrigue. National governments, even the United States, will become much weaker actors as scientific networks and socially responsible investors and foundations become the more powerful actors.If we do the right things, there is room for all on the planet. We can achieve the four key goals of a global society: prosperity for all, the end of extreme poverty, stabilization of the global population, and environmental sustainability. These are not utopian goals or pipe dreams, yet they are far from automatic. Indeed, we are not on a successful trajectory now to achieve these goals. Common Wealth points the way to the course correction we must embrace for the sake of our common future.

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain.

"This book provides a savvy survey of the latest work by designers, craftspeople, and architects of African descent from around the world. Artists and designers of African ancestry--many in Africa but also others throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Far East--are working in a wide array of mediums: fashion, architecture, non-traditional crafts, design, fine art, and photography. Authors Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond, together with six contributors, challenge presumptions of what constitutes an "African" style or aesthetic, and demonstrate the power and expressive potential of materials, textures and forms. Work by well-known artists such as Yinka Shonibare, MBE and architects including David Adjaye appear alongside those of lesser-known but equally exciting designers whose garments, carpets, baskets, ceramics, furniture, body arts, wall painting, photographs and sculpture blur the distinction between art and craft. The result is an enormously diverse display of young and established talent, and a wide-ranging survey of contemporary African art and design."--Publisher's website.